Generating explanations for events after the fact can result in faulty attribution and incorrectly identifying spuriously correlated events as having some meaningful connection. An example would be someone claiming divine intervention when they escape death or serious injury. In such situations it is possible to point to the events that resulted in minimizing or avoiding harm as being intentional and the result of external influence. Whether in research or in life, this is a dubious method of determining meaningful relationships between events. There are generally numerous possibilities for how the situation would unfold if it were possible to replay the events numerous times. Perhaps there is a relationship that would result in some degree of consistent repeatability. However, given the consistent patterns, or lack thereof, found in much behavioral research, it is probable that many assumed patterns would in fact not be consistently observed.
Statistically, there is also the issues caused by evaluating numerous potential relationships at one time. By nature of statistics it is probable that when evaluating numerous relationships a few will be significant by chance. When viewing events post hoc, there are serious limits on how one can tease apart these chance significant relationships from actual relationships. Amid the complexities found in real life and in more elaborate experiments, viewing these events in hindsight can result in a person focusing on the one or few significant relationships. Thereby what is merely 'noise' or error rises erroneously to the level of meaningfulness.
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